“Men need to feel a cold spike of fear when they begin a sexual encounter.” Those were not the words of a nun at your local Catholic high school 50 years ago. They were written in 2014 by the progressive Ezra Klein, editor of Vox, in explaining the importance of California’s “affirmative consent” law.

Passed in 2015, the law requires that students at the state’s colleges must obtain “affirmative, conscious and voluntary agreement to engage in sexual activity” from their partners. If not, they could be subject to disciplinary procedures for sexual assault.

It is one of the astounding ironies of our current era that universities, which have long been billed as havens of sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll, places to experiment and rebel before you grow up, now employ armies of bureaucrats to regulate the sex lives of their students. These administrators hand out condoms and invite students to lectures by professional dominatrixes, while at the same time holding secret tribunals to punish men who engage in what can best be described as regrettable drunken hookups with their female classmates.

How did we get here? In their new book “The Campus Rape Frenzy,” KC Johnson and Stuart Taylor offer a detailed history of the panic over sexual assaults on campus and the use and abuse of Title IX to prosecute the alleged offenders.

While “keep your pecker in your pants” is good advice, it largely misses the point. It implicitly places all responsibility for any potential sexual encounter on the young man.

Similarly, “keep your knees together” is good advice for the young women, but if the ladies were advised to abstain and the men were not, it would — and quite properly so — be decried as sexist, placing all the responsibility for proceeding or halting a hook-up on the young woman.

You need both. The problem on campuses is, they’re not doing both. Instead, with all the “disciplinary tribunals” and “affirmative consent” policies, all the onus and responsibility — and all the disciplinary actions — are being placed squarely on the men. Women are assumed in all cases to be innocent and blameless, so the guilt and blame automatically shifts onto the men.

The idea is that the women should get to enjoy a hook-up culture without any of the requisite responsibility — the way the feminists running things seem to believe men do — but that idea is 100% incompatible with the concept of mutually consensual encounters, sexual or not.

When two college students get drunk and end up in bed together, who is at fault? The status quo is that it is always the male who is at fault. This policy treats the woman as though she is a child, and incapable of making adult decisions. If the feminists weren’t so intent on hating college boys, they would realize that they are promoting a Victorian standard of treating women as child-like and needing a chivalrous man to take care of them.